


Drunk Texts

by little_ogre



Series: Send Nudes [2]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs, Descriptions of sex, Drunkenness, Epistolary, Explicit Language, M/M, SOAKED IN HOOKER PERFUME, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-02-23 10:04:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23043202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_ogre/pseuds/little_ogre
Summary: "Billy seldom received anything, except one very memorable time, a truly exceptionally, filthy letter written anonymously in a delicate hand on scented paper. Goody occasionally jibed him about his “lady friend” but Billy had honestly no idea where it might have come from."Lets just say Goodnight is lucky that he predates drunk dialing with a couple of hundred years.Prequel/sequel to Send Nudes but can be read on its own.
Relationships: Goodnight Robicheaux/Billy Rocks
Series: Send Nudes [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1656004
Comments: 31
Kudos: 53





	1. Chapter 1

For all their gun slinging and prize fighting Goodnight and Billy are jack of all trades, and not all of them are earned in the arena of blood and dust, and the fine quivering line between the quick and the dead. 

It's Sunday and Goodnight is in the back of the saloon, nicely set up with papers and a steel nibbed pens, opposite a respectable young cowhand in his Sunday shirt. The man is nervously twirling his hat back and forth by the brim. 

“And tell her…” he says, brow sweating with the effort of producing words - they have already covered his health, how much land he has broken and the expected yield, a brief outline of improvements to his batch and the vague hope that if the harvest holds and the bank stays kind they could be married next spring - all set out in Goodnight's neat hand on the paper in front of him. It's the second letter he's written today, and a service he provides occasionally for earnest young men needing to send word to their mothers and sweethearts, but far too ill at ease with a pen to do it themselves. 

“Tell her..” the tip of the young man’s tongue comes out to touch his top lip and his Adam’s apple bobs. “Tell her I’m thinking of her.”

Goodnight nods, “Already in here son,” he says easily, scanning over the lines, slightly bored. “ At the top “ _Dear Abilene. I’m in good health and thinking of you…”_ he rattles it off. By now he has a mental letter already written, only changing with the name at the beginning, dear Mother, dear Louisa, Carol, Mary...

“No,” the young man says and hunches over to look at Goodnight, his eyes screwed to his and his mouth tight, “tell her I’m, you know, uh, _thinking_ of her.” His hand makes a short, aborted motion towards his lap and understanding dawns on Goody.

He sits back and peers at the man. He’s young and handsome, in a clean cut strong-shouldered manner, as long as he doesn’t open his mouth to reveal his overbite and lack of conversation skills. There’s a muscle twitching nervously in his jaw and his large body is curved over the rough hands in his lap. He might, once upon a faraway time, have been the type of boy Goodnight would have looked at and talked circles around.

Apart from his albatross reputation as a war-hero, some would reckon Goodnight a rake and a _bon vivant_ ; and in either case he’s never been a shrinking violet; more than moderately gifted in the fine art of courtship.There is already the princely sum of one dollar in exchange for the written word on the table. Goodnight knocks back his drink and sucks at his teeth, the way a man would do eyeing up a challenge.

“Now, Winston, is it?” He holds out his empty glass. “ Why don’t you go and get me another drink and we’ll see if we can write a letter _really_ worth reading?”

It takes two more drinks, and in fairness to young Winston, it’s not bitter bottom shelf drink, but the good stuff, that slides down smooth as honey and leaves a general feeling of bonhomie in its wake, but eventually Goodnight has produced a letter which can only be considered _literature_ (maybe not literature for vicars and church ladies, but most things considered real art were never for vicars and church ladies anyhow). A well honed arrow in Cupid’s quiver, blue enough to heat anyone’s petticoats, even if he says so himself.

For a moment his pen had hovered over the blank white paper, because, what could a good family girl _really_ want to hear? But it had been over in a flash and he has spent half an hour murmuring filth to a handsome young man who kept nodding and looking increasingly glazed. Winston walked away awkwardly, slightly bent forward, Goody noticed with some satisfaction when he finally picked up his letter and left. 

Goodnight then wrote a very boring letter from the saloon owner to some old auntie he was keeping sweet in case of her inheritance, but some sparks of elation must still have been chasing him, for when he looked up to see Billy gracefully making his way across the saloon the sight was enough to make him comfortably warm. 

Billy, with his infinite disdain for the white man’s world in general, and for any work done while sitting on one’s backside specifically, had excused himself early and gone his own way, silent and mysterious as a cat. Seeing him across the saloon, quietly making his way up the stairs to their room, it struck Goodnight again how extraordinarily handsome he was. Not only his fine-featured face and intelligent eyes, but his broad shoulders straining against the fabric of his shirt, his narrow hips and strong legs, the sheer calm capability that radiated off him. Dangerous, but never needlessly threatening, he had the air of a man who knew himself and had no need for either empty posture or empty words. Considering both of those things were Goodnight’s stock and trade these days it was a miracle that anybody like Billy could stand his company. And yet, Goodnight wanted more, stupidly he could never be pleased with what he had, and now felt himself watching his beautiful companion like an old dog watching a juicy bone. Disgust for himself curling his lip Goody wrenched his eyes away and busied himself with putting the finishing flourishes to the letter, before sprinkling it with blotting sand.

Setting the letter aside and looking up to see Winston returned, followed by three hulking young men, all of them nervously clutching their hats.

“Mr Robicheaux, sir this is Emmet, Dean and Curly,” Winston said with hesitance. “I told them how you’d helped me write to my Abilene and Emmet here, he married only two months ago before we went on the drive, and Dean’s girl threw him over and he’s awful cut up about it, and Curly is hoping to put the question to a girl he’s sweet on and could use a helpful phrase or two….

Goodnight gave them a considering look, rough men with rough hands and quiet panic in their eyes and smiled his most winning smile. 

“Gentlemen,” he says jovially and indicated the chair opposite him at the table. ”Who's first?”

It’s almost like being a confessioner, but instead of absolving the sin he spins it out and hands it back.

It’s an unusual evening, normally his little letter writing ventures never bring on more than a dollar or four, and never tells anything more interesting than bland wishes for good health and how many bushels of wheat the writer hopes to harvest. 

He dips into his near atrophied memories of courting young women in Baton Rouge long ago for Curly, whose poor eyes look like they might pop out of his head at Goodnight’s more flowery sentences and he has to reel himself back in when the boy says “I don’t rightly know if she’ understand all that. She’d never been too much for them long words.”

And Goodnight can make his heart bleed on paper without too much effort, even as Dean’s brow furrows in slow confusion.

“It’s just you know, we’ve been talking about it for a few years and I thought she’d be happy to maybe do it next year if Mr Luton lets me have a share in the herd, and suddenly she’s saying that a girl can’t hang her hat on maybes and next years and that John Houlihan has the tailors shop with a steady income and can marry her in May when her sister’s visiting, and what’s a fella supposed to do with something like that?”

Goodnight somewhat highhandedly translates this into “my love is not silver to tarnish with time, but gold, ever burnished to gleam,” and adds a reproachful “we give the seed time to grow in the rich soil so we can harvest in due time and would not prematurely reap the golden wheat because we are hungry today” and seals the letter with as firm a reiteration of the previous vague promise as he can manage.

Dean hopefully asks if he can fit some of that strong stuff he cooked up for Winston in it, to which Goodnight reminds him that perhaps it was better to secure the lady’s affection before committing oneself, and also never put strong words in a letter which might be read by her parents. Personally, he thinks that waiting indefinitely for the promise of six cows could get old pretty fast, but at least he’s given the lad a fighting chance.

Emmet sits down last and Goodnight looks at him, cracks his knuckles, and gets to work.

In the meantime Billy has come down to the saloon, but with his customary and innate delicacy, he’s sitting down in the bar for his meal, rather than intrude on Goodnight’s clients. With his normally wary instincts dulled by whiskey Goodnight lets his eyes drift over to him, and he ceases to imagine some hypothetical woman. Instead he imagines a very real man and all the things he’s ever thought about doing to him in the cold dark night when any actions or thoughts are between a man and his God, who surely in Goodnight’s case, long since stopped caring about such lesser sins. 

There is only one one embarrassing moment when Goodnight fetches a line about tangling his fingers in raven tresses and Emmet looks confused and says “Mary has blonde hair?” And it’s all Goody can do to look down and murmur “Of course, what was I thinking?” because he knows full well what he was thinking and of who.

When the evening is over he is well and truly lubricated by drink and some profoundly scandalous talk. He knows enough of the gleam in Emmet’s eyes that it would be easy to contrive an accidental meeting outside in the dark and there continue to conjure up a third female presence to give alibi to two men finding relief from their straining bodies with each other. He’s done that often enough in his younger days but maybe age has given him better sense, or even a misplaced dignity, because the thought leaves a sour taste in his mouth, not ready to face that brittle hostile mood of regret from his partner once the moment has passed.

He’s sorting through his blotting papers, with jotted down refused phrases and thinks if he assembled them correctly they would be his own love letter. Blinking he sees Billy at the bar, knocking back his glass, the long column of his throat, the line of his jaw, his mustache framing his mouth - how it would be if it had been Billy opposite him at the table today? Billy hot and fumbling with Goodnight’s voice cracking and weaving around him, slowly turning him on? Billy with a blotchy pink on his cheeks and shifting uncomfortably in his seat? He doesn't think any sense of dignity could have saved him then. If Billy even showed a passing interest in a friendly hand Goodnight would be in over his elbows and damn the consequences. However, he would hate to lose Billy's friendship over something so trivial as his carnal impulses and so it's always a walk on a tightrope. 

As if summoned by his thoughts, or quite possibly feeling the burning look, Billy comes ambling over to sit down by Goodnight’s table, pulling up his chair companionably close. He sits down and treats Goody to a smirk through his eyelashes. It makes parts of Goodnight feel distinctly hot and bothered. Sometimes he wonders if this would have been easier if Billy wasn’t so goddamn beautiful but equally, Goodnight would probably have had less problems in life if he wasn’t such a sucker for a pretty face.

“A good day?” Billy asks and Goodnight can’t help but preen a little; its rare that he is the earner out of the two of them, and for all that they are a two-man act, it is undeniably Billy who does the most work. Now there are eight dollars on the table in front of him, which is much more than what this usually brings in. Billy leans over and deftly scoops half of the pile into his hand.

“You owe me,” he says with barely perceptible grin when Goodnight splutters. 

“I do not!” Goody protests and Billy shrugs.

“You bet me three dollars last week that we couldn’t come across a bigger idiot than that man who got suckered into investing all his gold in a rare slug farm in Nevada, and just this morning before the show, didn’t we see a man who was stuffing rattlesnakes down his pants for entertainment?”

Goodnight glares and then sighs. “Fair’s fair, I suppose, _mon ami_. _Ça va, ça vien_ t,” he shrugs and Billy’s face softens and he pushes two dollars back over the table. 

“I owe you for the tobacco, last month when I ran out,” he says, the tiniest quirk to his mouth and Goodnight pockets one, ignoring the slide of Billy’s fingers across his knuckles, and pushes the other one back over the table.

“You picked up the supplies last time though,” he points out and Billy blows out smoke before looking at Goody.

“Actually, they gave me a discount, I just never gave you the change,” he says, flicking the coin back. 

It's an outright fight after that, flicking coins back and forth and at some point Billy puts his broad hand on Goodnight's thigh to steady himself. If they had been out on the trail Goody might have tipped him in the dirt just for the joy of it, rolling around play-fighting like they were children, but in the saloon they are confided to painfully bumping elbows and knees together, knocking into ribs and shins. Billy steals Goodnight's glass and drains it, Goody steals it right back. 

“Stop being a child,” he hisses, refilling the glass and not at all savoring the thrill of fitting his lips to where Billy’s had been, sipping the drink.

“I'm just repaying my debts, very manly.” Billy answers mildly and Goodnight has to wrench his mind away from how Billy is otherwise manly. It's only half successful but Goody is willing to blame that part on the fact that Billy still has his hand on his thigh. 

Sam once said that Goody's whole problem was that he couldn't leave well enough alone.

He didn't _have_ to be the Confederate Army's best damn sharp shooter, he could have been a perfectly mediocre soldier, so in effect so he brought that one on himself, and just in the same manner he’s in this mess because _could_ have partnered up just anyone and not (by Goodnight's objective estimation) _the_ most handsome man in the world. There had to be a few men out there who could do what Billy could do and not look so striking while doing it, surely?

In any case he could have befriended Billy in that Texas saloon and then just taken off in the right opposite direction, because you would think by now Goodnight could recognize a bad idea when he was staring into its improbably handsome face. But since he obviously can’t leave well enough alone, he’s sitting drunk, aroused and infatuated in a dirty saloon, watching Billy's mouth around his cigarette and wondering if there is a way to broach the subject before he breaks out in an embarrassing rash due to unreleased lust (that _could_ happen, in his company one of the soldiers who'd chosen not to relieve himself any other way, had gotten painful little boils all down his back and swore up and down it was due to all the pent up needs he had). 

“What's with you?” Billy says sourly and pokes him in the ribs. “You seem preoccupied.” And for all Goody is pretty sure Billy doesn't share his perverted inclinations he sure don't like it when Goodnight's attention is elsewhere. 

Billy excused himself for the night but Goodnight is riled enough that he can't go to bed just yet. Or at least, he's not sure he would go to his own bed and that’s a bad decision he’s not ready to make just yet. 

Laid out in front of him is the scattered jigsaw of a letter, and in the mild amber glow of whiskey the idea seems overwhelmingly simple and straightforward. He’s given voice to other people’s desires all evening, so why couldn’t he do the same for himself? Goodnight has dipped the pen into the inkwell and written the first word before he can even think about whether he should or not.

Oh, there are so many things he has longed to tell Billy and here is paper, blank and trustworthy before him. His mouth almost waters at the prospect. He could write it all and leave the emotions here, pinned like butterflies to the paper. The next thought in the chain pulls him up short, that after he’s written the letter, he could send it to Billy. The thought is exhilarating, causing the blood to pulse. Disguised in a plain envelope Goodnight’s illicit feelings might travel mixed cheek by jowl in with other innocent messages, the paper white and chaste in the mail bag until, in a roundabout way, they will reach Billy and no telling where or who it came from. A letter in the mail with no signature is washed clean by many hands.

Goodnight swallows painfully. Send it to Billy and maybe be lucky enough to see him receive it, to watch him read it, confused and wary when opening the envelope and then - his eyes steadily growing round, watch color chase over his beautiful bronze skin, teeth digging into his lip. To see him react to some of the more outrageous suggestions, would he flush and swallow, or grow pale and stutter? Would he for a moment look at Goodnight with darkened eyes, breath heaving and pulse beating at the base of this throat? Or would he excuse himself and seek solitude with Goodnight's letter, crumpling the paper in his urgency until it was stained with fluids from both their lusts? 

The opportunity to rile Billy, to fluster him -even through this remote medium - is irresistible. Besides, why shouldn’t he tell Billy he is beautiful? Lord knows nobody else will say it to him, but Goodnight sees, he sees the envious glances of the men and the hot, coveting looks from the women.He tries to train his own gaze to the ground but its hard when looking is such a pleasure. The paper is a vessel for all his confessions and he’s halfway down the page before he realizes that he’d be a fool to think Billy won’t recognize his handwriting.

It most certainly is a problem. Goodnight absently drains his glass and considers masking his handwriting by writing with his left hand,(a plan surely only a person with considerable mental faculties would think of) but after only a few words he’s forced to conclude that while the writing is not recognizable as his own hand, it’s not even recognizable as writing, and adding insult to injury he has smeared ink all over the side of his hand and his sleeve.

He's wiping the ink of his hand, curiously clumsy when he hears the chair opposite slide out and a woman sits down in a rustle of skirts. 

“Pour a girl a drink, cowboy?” she asks in a curiously husky voice, holding out an empty glass.She’s not young anymore, her lips thinning and with lines around her mouth, but she is still beautiful and her eyes have a spark of humor rare to see in somebody so long in the game.

His bottle is still on the table with a more than decent amount in it, and it is always wise to stay on the good side of the establishment’s girls, so Goodnight pours her a measure and lit a cigarette. She smoked quietly for a moment while Goodnight brooded over his letter, trying to re-arrange a troublesome sentence.

“That’s a good little business,” she says after a while, inclining her head and when Goodnight looked up at her she smiles. “I’m Sally, and you would be?” 

She reaches her hand across the table, small and delicate in lacy gloves.

“Goodnight's my name,” he says, shaking her hand and she huffs and blows smoke at him. 

“Funny, that’s usually my line,” She raised an eyebrow sardonically. It made Goodnight choke and then laugh, in his experience that was a much more frank admission than the usual coy game where the women pretended that the money was incidental to the transaction and the men pretended to believe them.

“Been watching you all evening, mister, it’s a good skill to have, writing for those who can’t.”

“You looking to have a letter written?” Goodnight asks absently, shuffling through his blotters to find a piece of blank paper and Sally shook her head.

“No, I’ve a fair hand myself,” she says, idly using one of the fine nibbed pencils to make a few letters on some discarded paper, in a beautiful, even hand. “Was thinking I was going to be a school marm once...” She raised her bare shoulder in an eloquent gesture. “No, writing I can do myself, it’s the other talent I lack, to find the words and putting ‘em to paper.”

Goodnight laughed. “As you can see I have an abundance of words,” he says lightly, indicating the scattered and scratched papers that littered the table and Sally smiles, locking her eyes to his.

“It would seem so,” she says and lent forward over the table, “And seeing as we both are in the business of selling our services, maybe we can trade, tit for tat?”

For a moment Goodnight’s taken aback, the girls didn’t often control their own trade or even their own customers, and looking closely at her he can see the faint line of tension in her shoulders, the way her face is purposefully blank. She is out in her own errand then and hoping not to be found out. The barman, in the process of wiping down the counters and closing the bar, pays them no mind.just one of the older girls scamming drink of an old cowboy. Goodnight considers the offer, girls was often more trouble and funds than he had to spare, and while women had never been his primary attraction a hand was a hand and Goodnight had been around long enough not to be too choosy,when his gaze fell upon the letters she had formed in a looping, delicate, and distinctly female script. 

“By all means let’s do business, _cherié_ but trade like for like,” he can feel a grin pulling at his mouth, his troublemaker smile, toothy like the smile of a fox. “It just so happens that if I write a letter for you, _you_ can write a letter for _me_ …” 

That night Goodnight writes two letters.

He writes one letter about the loneliness of the soul, that grabs at you in the small hours of the night and makes you curl around your pillow in desperation for another warm body sleeping close to you. He writes of how two people, who fate may have been unkind to, can make a new start somewhere else where nobody knows where they come from; and how in the frontiers people can so easily get lost that there is no telling if the two persons who left a settlement will be the same persons who reach the next one. How easily two single women can set out, and be sisters when they reach the next town, one of them respectably married and widowed and nobody will look askance at them for living under the same roof. How out west you can make a decent living on a vegetable garden and selling eggs, if you have only a little money to get started with. He paints a vivid picture of how two women may live contentedly with a garden, a donkey and their own little business and nobody making questions, and if they bear passing resemblance to somebody a traveller might have seen somewhere else, in a less settled situation then what of it? Travellers may see many people who more or less resemble each other. 

He talks to Sally until her eyes gets faraway and dreamy and her words less guarded and he paints the picture carefully, lets the ink drip onto the paper slowly, like a soft rain on parched earth.

The other one,well…

When he pushes the paper over to Sally for her to copy her eyebrows climb and climb on her forehead until she looks up at him, her eyes reluctantly impressed. 

“That's... _that's_ something,” she says. “You've certainly thought about this.”

And Goodnight can’t say much to that, only tip up his glass and feel the liquor burn in his throat, like silence, like unspoken nights elbow to elbow under the stars, Billy’s eyes and calm good humor.

“Yeah,” he concedes. “You might say that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "first" patent for a telephone was signed in 1876 so even if Goody doesn't actually predate the telephone as such, drunk dialing probably had a little while before it took off.
> 
> Abilene is a city in Texas but picked here for its definition in The Meaning of Liff: ABILENE (adj.) Descriptive of the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow.
> 
> My estimation of how much a dollar was worth 1890 is firmly based on The Little House on the Prairie books, so that Goodnight charged those young men two dollars per letter heavily implies that he fleeced them.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if I have to warn for this but very dirty letter below. Like you know, love yourselves and make good choices and all that.

_Billy Rocks,_

_Volcano Springs, California,_

_August 189-_

_To you, who sets me ablaze -_ mon amour, mon coeur, mon rêve

_I ought to begin this letter with begging your forgiveness for what you are about to read. Don’t judge me, in company I have never let a coarse word come past my lips, and never with a flashing eye betrayed unseemly passions, and though you might think me as unbridled as a she-fox in heat, a shameless wanton, it is for you, and only you. In my life I have been chaste as Diana in her orb, before my eyes set to you and your beauty laid me to waste. Let me bend your ear and whisper the innermost secrets of my heart, the sheet of the paper steadfastly white though my cheeks are hot and flushing._ Je pense toujours à toi, tes yeux, j’en rêve jour et nuit, ma beau, ma chér.

_There must be some star too near the earth exercising a celestial influence for I am in a fever-fit of animal desire, my blood singing, making me senseless and brave enough to set aside my natural modesty and commit these words to paper. Do not let this letter disgust you, I assure you the sentiments I have must be felt by anyone who has seen your face, though they may rarely be expressed._

_Your beauty is the mountainside, bleeding red in the setting sun. The liquid oceans of your eyes, can look as mild and gentle as the dove and and as terrifying and sparkling as the basilisk. I long to touch you - though it may burn my hand. What ecstasy to touch the coarse silk of your hair, trapping grit and dust like a spider’s web. To run my thumbs over the smooth stretch of skin across your cheekbones. Touch my fingers to your lips and feel your tongue wrap around the pad of my smallest finger, giving and hot, wet and mucal like I would be for you, sweet and welcoming._

_I dream of you in filthy poses, sitting with your legs indecently splayed, and I would crawl to you on my hands and knees, like a dog or a whore, my mouth open and panting to receive you. I imagine you lying spread out on a bed, cock curving hard and enticing against your stomach. I long to take you into my body, my muscles clenching hard around you and to hear you gasp in ecstasy as you plunge into me. The things I would tell you in such moments: “Fill me up, fill me up,_ basier moi. Donne-moi ton foutre, mon amour, mon rêve _._

_I conjure you in my mind, like a magician calling up his mischievous imps and nymphs to cavort, or a witch her black sinuous familiar. I fuck myself slowly on my fingers all the while imagine the things I would do were you but in my presence. To lie heads and tails with you fondling and tickling your soft vulnerable sack,my mouth enclosing your cock, and my fingers finding that most secret point, exploring your cleft and silky insides, until you moan and keen. And while so occupied your head would be wedged in turn in between my thighs, hands clutching my ass, leaving your dark bruising marks on me and your tongue licking ravenously up into my cunt. I think of these things and bring myself off, until I’m pulsating with want and need, my bed soiled and hand slick. Until I can't be quiet but cry and scream and moan, thinking of our pleasure._

_I think of you with your shirt removed but your splendid knife belt still in possession, the smooth filigree handles resting against my heated skin. You are dangerous,_ mon amour _and the danger excites me. I would have you pin me with your knives and with your body, and I long to give myself over to you and be entirely at your mercy. To welcome your magnificent cock into me, the heavy weight in my wet mouth, the perfect curve breaching my cunt and finally my ass, slow, slow until I'm full of you and only you, until I have been fucked by you in every hole I possess,panting and senseless. I imagine this and so much else until I'm wrung out and spent, curling lonely around your absence._

_I think it is madness sometimes that I wish to peel you like a ripe fruit, split you open and eat the soft sweet flesh within, to have your juices running down my face, gently undo button after button in the fly of your trousers and take out your fat cock, lap it up in my moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in my mouth. And I would drink every drop you’d give me and swallow it, keeping you with me forever, until you knew I was yours entire._

_I wish to take you out of your bath water, fingers puckered and your hair dripping like a raven waterfall and abase myself like your servant. With white and clean towels dry your whole body, from your feet to your muscular thighs and strong shoulders. I would rub sweet oil into your hair. Then I would spread you face down into our clean bed and bury my face in between your ass cheeks and eat you with the same animal enjoyment as a sow at her trough. I wish to fuck you with my tongue and sample the musky delicacy of this your most private area until you are leaking and begging, until you come apart for me and under me and swear with broken cracked voice that nobody has ever done you so good._

_Ever since I first saw you I have done so much and so often that I am afraid to look to see how that thing I had is after all I have done. I have rubbed my clit so often that it is a wonder that it is still in place and not worn clean away, leaving only a blank spot. I say this in the hopes of making you laugh, and in laughing forgive me for taking such liberties with your person. I love you too well to harbor any low thoughts about you and hope you will do me the same kindness in return._

_Farewell, you shall never know me -_

Je pense toujours à toi.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Diana in her Orb" is a reference the virgin goddess Diana or Artemis, and comes from Much Ado about Nothing, the full quote goes "You seem to me as Diana in her orb, chaste as is the bud ere it be blown. But you are more intemperate in your blood, Than Venus, or those pampered animals,That rage in savage sensuality" so when Goodnight says hes been chaste as Diana in her orb it means pretty much actually not very chaste at all.
> 
> This letter is largely based on James Joyce's letters to his wife Nora Barnacle. Not only are they spectacularly dirty letters but I figured as well that they would be a good ballpark for what kind of sex people were having a the turn of the century (in Joyce's case 69ing and scatsex, its a pretty eye-searing read). They are written in the 1909 so not quite contemporary to Billy and Goodnight but close enough. Is also worth mentioning that later in life Joyce tried to have an affair with another lady who terminated the relationship on the grounds of his "bizarre" love letters, so it it would seem that Nora Barnacle was just Into That. The letters were first published in 1975 in the Selected Letters of James Joyce and can be found floating around the internet. It has to be said that the above is pretty mild in comparison.
> 
> This letter was meant to have a lot more French but as I don't speak any French that plan had to be revised.


	3. Epilogue

Memory is a funny old thing Goodnight reflected, because he had genuinely not been able to remember a single blessed thing about it until he stood in their rooms in Volcano springs watching Billy frown at small, grubby paper rectangle. In all honesty, like most of his memories that sometimes springs out to ambush him he thinks he would have preferred to be without it. Billy carefully lifted the envelope to his nose and sniffed and then made a face and turned his head away.

“Tsch! It stinks!” he hissed and scrunched up his nose. 

_Goodnight has choppy memories of reeling of a particularly filthy phrase in French, and Sally sliding under the table laughing. He has a blurry memory of her murmuring “oops” and a strong scent of perfume flooding his nose._

_“I thought you were only going for un p’tit, un soupcon…”he says as she fishes one of the papers out of the puddle. It hangs limp and drenched._

_“‘S gonna smell like..like...very much” he manages and Sally shrugs, unbothered._

_“After your fella reads this letter ain't no way he’s gonna think it comes from no lady,” she says and Goodnight concedes the truth of that._

Billy slits the envelope open with his smallest knife, unfolds and frowns suspiciously at the paper, and Goodnight thinks that if ever God saw fit to strike him down for his crimes in the war, _right now_ would be an excellent time.

“It’s in French,” Billy says, frowning suspiciously, his expressive eyebrows drawing down. “Maybe it’s for you?

“For me?” Goodnight laughs nervously. “Why would it be for me? I don't even speak French.” Oh God, it is not a proud day for the Robicheaux clan.

“You speak French _all the time_ ,” Billy says slowly and Lord, Goodnight really said that, didn’t he? 

“Yes, yes of course but not this kind of French,” Goody says hastily and makes himself walk over and pretend to throw an eye at the letter, whose content is nauseatingly familiar. “This is, uh, heh, this is Quebecois French, which is something entirely different. Completely the wrong end of the old _Arcadie_ , eh?”

The look Billy gives him is unconvinced but he goes back to making faces at his letter instead and Goodnight takes the opportunity to leave the room and as soon as he’s out of sight drain whatever is left in his flask in once chug. That is really Billy in the other room reading, reading _that_. Goodnight really wishes he didn't finish all of the whiskey in his flask because he is going to need more. He rubs his face, noticing absently that his hands are shaking again. Goddamn, these days anything will give him the shakes. He tries to think back, after the letter was finished what had happened?

_Sally seals it up and writes the address on Goodnight's instructions, and bundles it together with the other much more earnest and hopeful letter._

_“Were gonna have to burn that one, if it goes in the mail the whole bag will be arrested for public indecency,” Goody says, rubbing his face, night and bleariness beginning to set in and Sally hiccups a giggle._

_“‘S certainly incendiary enough,” she concedes, head dipping forward to rest on the table. “If the content in't enough to set it ablaze the perfume certainly is.”_

It must have gone in the post. Goodnight resists the urge to curse and to laugh. Goddamn-son-of-a-bitch letter actually got posted and now Billy is in the other room reading about Goodnight’s wish to eat his ass like a peach. A desperate giggle threatens to break free from his throat and he stifles it. Nothing for it but putting on a good face and breeze through it. Goodness knows he has lived through things he thought might kill him before.

When he enters the room Billy lifts his head, looking slightly wild around the eyes.

“Goodnight,” he says, almost reverently. “This letter, it’s, it’s _filthy_.”

And Goodnight can almost feel the grin slip off his face but hitches it back up in the last minute to clap Billy jovially on the back and turn him around to head for the saloon.

“Is that so, my friend?” he says. “Well, let's see if we can find some Canadian fur trappers to translate that unholy gibberish for you, why as my Daddy used to say…”

_Goodnight woke, sitting up on the floor beside his bed, with his head and shoulders on the mattress and the rest of his body slumped down on the boards, given up as a bad job. One of his boots is standing in the washbasin. It is doubtlessly his worst hangover since he was sixteen and got drunk on raw cider. Even his teeth are aching._

_Billy is lying comfortably in his bed, reading a book and only spares Goody half a pitying glance when he groans pathetically._

_“It's your own fault,” is all he says, without an ounce of sympathy._

_“Doesn't make me feel better” Goodnight whines, closing his eyes and crawling the rest of the way into the bed, slow like a lizard. Honestly he thinks moving fast right now would kill him. What was he thinking? He's too old to be feeling this bad._

_“What did you even get up to?” Billy asks, mildly curious._

_“You know I haven't the faintest recollection,” Goody answers and pulls the pillow over his head, the whole evening lost in a haze. Something about letters? He can't remember, and it’s not likely to matter anyway is his last thought before he goes back to black, dreamless sleep._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutout to Poemsingreenink for Goodnight denying all knowledge of French and then blaming a lecherous Quebecois, as per the comment section of Send Nudes.


End file.
